Women Poets, Child Readers

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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A, B and (not) Seeing: Animals and Other Ironies in Alphabet Books

Oxford Literary Review ◽

10.3366/olr.2019.0280 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 41 (2) ◽

pp. 219-237

Author(s):

Jennifer Ford

Keyword(s):

Young Children ◽

Early Literacy ◽

Word Play ◽

Word And Image ◽

Alphabet Books ◽

Child Readers

For generations, alphabet books have been widely used by parents, librarians and teachers as early literacy tools for young children. Through images, word play and the interactions between word and image, alphabet books have the effect of introducing preliterate young children to the names, images, symbols and concepts regarding animals, what Matthew Calarco has called ‘symbolic mechanisms’ of animals—names, images, concepts, cultural associations of animals—yet they can also be deconstructive of those same mechanisms. Derrida's insights into the contradictory logic of the supplement and parergon as well as the ‘destabilising synergies of word and image’ offer deconstructive readings of alphabet books for adult and child readers. Recognising what Derrida calls the ‘childlike’ in texts such as alphabet books creates unique polymorphous spaces for the further interrogation of notions of animals.

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